Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/31/boost-the-storage-on-your-xbox.html
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You should mention that the 5Gb/s speed is the drive’s cache speed, because it’s spinning rust with a bit of flash for cache. Saying fast SSHD might confuse people into buying it thinking it’s actually a good flash drive.
Furthermore, the caching strategy might not work for large games. Playing a game for a while may or may not fill it with the game assets, starting a new game may or may not fill it, who knows. Plus multiplayer games where the load time would be the most functional probably wouldn’t even fit in the cache to begin with.
Basically, it’s maybe meant to cache the OS boot trace and home dir, if the caching strategy is even good enough for that, but it probably fails at caching anything useful.
Then you get into the reliability problems. It’s both spinning rust and flash! The eco head parking at a few hundred or a few thousand times per day will reach the engineered lifetime first, but the complexity comes with its own interesting failure modes as Fusion drive users can attest.
Some of these Boing Boing Store posts are worse than others.
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Let’s look at a review from Eurogamer:[quote=“Eurogamer”]We used Battlefield 1 as a case study for the Firecuda’s properties, kicking off with a launch PlayStation 4 model. It’s a game with some notoriously long load times on PS4’s stock drive, where the first campaign mission can take almost two minutes to get going . Impressively, an SSD brings that down to a mere 47.7 seconds, though on its first load, the Firecuda offers no loading time gains even close to that mark. At 112.8 seconds it’s actually a backwards step - but the twist? The more we repeat the loading procedure (always restarting the application from scratch), the faster the Firecuda becomes.[/quote]
Playing through the campaign once would be more painful than the stock drive. Multiplayer on the same map would be almost as good as an SSD after a few loads. Random maps though and the set probably wouldn’t fit in the cache. Just get an SSD without the caddy for a little more than this SSHD and caddy and you get the fast load time the first time.
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A word of advice: this Xbox One Storage Hub is only compatible with the original Xbox One, as it is designed to plug into the USB port located on the side of the console. The newer Xbox One S (and One X) no longer has a port there.
I mean, you could always use it with a USB extension cable, but then it would not fit flush against the side of your console, and you’d probably be better off just getting a normal portable drive.
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